Posted
by
Roblimo
on Tuesday December 01, 2015 @06:54PM
from the we're-all-alike-under-our-skin dept.

This conversation was generated by a post Eric S. Raymond published on his "Armed and Dangerous" blog that said, "...if you are any kind of open-source leader or senior figure who is male, do not be alone with any female, ever, at a technical conference. Try to avoid even being alone, ever, because there is a chance that a 'women in tech' advocacy group is going to try to collect your scalp." Eric later wrote a post about how Social Justice Warriors may be more of a problem than the problems they complain about.

Whoa! Predatory women in tech trying to entrap people like (and including) Linus Torvalds the way an old-time private eye got the goods on an errant husband as part of a divorce case? Scary! And worrying about thoughtcrime, too? Oh my! But Liz Bennett is an actual software engineer who works at Loggly in San Francisco. She writes for her company's blog when she's not writing Java code, has a (not very active) GitHub account, and plays bassoon. And her attitude is similar to the one espoused by ESR in the second post (above): write great code -- and if you do, they (for any value of they) have no right to be negative about you, period. And, she says, before you take a job you should be sure the company is a good "fit" for you and doesn't harbor people who will work to bring you down -- which is great advice for anyone, in any field of endeavor.

Robin 'Roblimo' Miller for Slashdot:
This is Liz Bennett who is a coder, a programmer with--what’s
that company?

Liz
Bennett: Oh Loggly?

Slashdot:
Loggly, which is an interesting cute name. We were talking about
some stuff that the well-known Eric S. Raymond has been talking about
recently about women who are being so put upon or feel they are so
put upon in the coding arena that some of them are supposedly trying
to trap Linus Torvalds, among other people, into some sort of huge uh
oh bad sexual harassment thing. So Liz, are you trying to trap Linus
Torvalds or Eric Raymond?

Liz
Bennett: You know the thought actually hadn’t crossed my
mind. But seeing that blog post has surely got me thinking, maybe I
should. That was sarcasm by the way, in case, it is being lost.

Slashdot:
Realize people, that she does play bassoon
--which leads to
sarcasm. And she writes Java. Liz, so how about you? Does anybody
give you a hard time for being female or whatever?

Liz
Bennett: To be honest, not, not really. No. It is not like
something that never comes up. Sometimes, most of the time I am the
only woman in the room, and something will come up and they will be
like “Oh Liz! How does that make you feel as the token woman?”
and I will be like, “I don’t know. I am just a person.
Like how would it make you feel?” I don’t know. It
doesn’t really happen. It doesn’t happen. But I have also
been really careful to vet the company culture, the place that I am
interviewing, at which I’m interviewingwith the idea of
working at it.

I am
really careful because it is kind of a cultural thing; like some
companies may have a culture where it is kind of a more “taken
for granted” type place and I would probably avoid a company
like that at all costs. Loggly is a really fantastic company. Their
culture is just so open and so nice, so accepting. Nobody has ever
said anything disparaging to me ever, so I am just so grateful that
most of the time, most people are actually decent human beings in the
tech industry despite what you might think.

Slashdot:
Well, I looked at the company’s About page and staffing
team thing, and you are not the only woman who works there in a
position of responsibility, are you?

Liz
Bennett: Oh no. I am just so for the first like eight to nine
months I was here I was the only woman in the engineering department.

Slashdot:
What about the whole Gamergate junk? Did that affect you?

Liz
Bennett: Oh not really. Not too much. I mean if I start getting
too involved in this stuff and too invested in the internet comments
and, like, the flames, where am I? And it’s like, it is not
really what I face on a daily basis. It is not like that. So it just
kind of gets me all rattled for finding no reason.

Slashdot:
Yeah.

Liz
Bennett: I just don’t, I don’t know, maybe I just
don’t keep up with it too much. It kind of doesn’t matter
to me. It doesn’t matter one way or the other. Or I can view it
as just work on the relationships I have with people around me and
just focus on doing a great job and being a great person. So I don’t
think the industry is rampant with horrible sexist men who are
actively trying to push women out. It is in reality, it is just not
what it is really like. It is not like that. Everybody I have ever
worked with has been really nice, been really supportive and just
been awesome coworkers. And it just so happens that there is only one
woman in the room. I don’t know – I guess I don’t
maybe – I just don’t have a particular inflammatory
thinking about it, so maybe I am not that concerned.

Slashdot:
No but I noticed you said that you before taking a job, you
looked them over a bit.

Liz
Bennett: Yeah, yeah, I mean anybody assesses a company they are
going to, they are not just assessing inclusion, and I wouldn’t
want to work for a company with a culture that I don’t enjoy. I
don’t think anybody would. Everybody has their social things
that they like and maybe there are people out there who really like
the programmer culture that they think is awesome without female.
That’s not the kind of place I am going to be looking for. And
maybe those are the kinds of places where there aren't going to be
any female engineers. If they decide hey this is a real big problem
for us, we need to hire more female engineers, then yeah, then they
might need to take a closer look at the culture and examine, “what
it is that’s kind of putting women off??” It is a little
bit of a Catch-22. Sometimes because maybe a culture is not great for
women because there are no women there. So how do you get more women,
have more women? Like how do you start? But I was one of the first
women to join, I was one of the first women to join the Loggly
engineering team, but at that time I was the only, there were no
other women when I joined. And I still felt fine about it, like all
the people I have interviewed with were so nice.

Slashdot:
What do you have for advice? There are other women out there who
are either just graduating college or just moving into actual
programming jobs, you just face it, we both know the
majority of women working in tech are doing like marketing and PR,
non-engineering work.

Liz
Bennett: Yeah.

Slashdot:
Doesn’t mean they are bad people. I know a lot of people in
that circumstance who are very good people, good friends.

Liz
Bennett: Yeah. So I guess the only advice is the thing that is
actually pretty hard for me on a day to day basis is kind of the
subtle biases that people have, and it is little bit hard to know how
to deal with that. It does get easier though. I feel like they
stereotyped it a lot. Being the only woman in the room is still, you
can kind of second guess yourself a lot. Everything you do and say
everything that people say and do to you, it's like do they say that
because I am a woman or they say that I am the youngest person on the
team, and they said, oh okay, I don’t know, I don’t know,
I don’t know, so that is really exhausting. I think the best
thing you can do about that is to just see yourself as a person and
everybody else is a person, you are not a woman, he is not a man, we
are all just people working together. And try not to think of one
isolated incident as a symptom of a much bigger problem or a much
bigger issue it could just be an isolated incident if you go talk to
that person, it might have been in this communication, you never
know.

The whole summary was disgusting. Roblimo kept trying to bait her into talking about sexism during the interview, and she wouldn't go for it. Then he turns the whole thing into a statement about ESR. If I was Liz I would be pissed.

ESR's statement wasn't out of the blue, though, just its inclusion in this summary is (WTF?). ESR was talking about a real problem, applicable a few dozen people in the world,and irrelevant to everyone else.

No-one has ever presented any actual evidence of this problem, and Linus has not said anything about needing a constant guard at conferences. No-one has ever been able to spot these people guarding him, or any other big names in open source for that matter.

It's complete rubbish. ESR won't reveal his source or present any evidence that what he says is true, and while we can never prove a negative (could be protected by invisible ninja I guess) we can observe that some of his specific claims seem suspect at b

Whilst I'm not sure anyone has been the victim of unfounded allegations by the "womens rights" lot in the IT industry, it has happened elsewhere in science - remember Professor Tim Hunt who spoke at a women's science conference, 3 sentences of his speech were tweeted by a SJW-type and next thing you know, he's out of a job (curing cancer no less) and widely criticised for being a misogynistic white male ba****d.

Turns out the truth is nothing like how its all been blown up to be, but that hasn't got him his job back. I think this is the real issue ESR is talking about, even if he's doing a poor job of highlighting it.

Tim Hunt's situation is hardly a case of unfounded allegations. He said something in front of a large crowd of people, in public, and never denied saying it. The only issue was that there was something of a rapid overreaction on social media and from his university, which jumped the gun a bit. However, the "allegations" were not at all false, he did say those things and stood by them when asked.

I don't think ESR's comments could be interpreted as saying that there are sometimes overreactions. He very clearl

Exactly the above. The interviewer was trying to be inflammatory, provocative, and instigating. Smacks of mainstream media. Whoever was asking the questions in this manner is the bigger societal problem in more areas than just women in tech. Liz was 100% real. The interviewer was baiting her with almost every single question and should be called out for it.

I'm a dyed-in-the-wool left-wing liberal through and through, I love socialism and I want equal opportunity for men and women. But I groan every time I see a woman being celebrated for being a software 'engineer' or somesuch when there is never such praise for men. And it always seems to be from people who are looking to push an agenda. No hard feelings on Ms. Bennet. I'm sure she's a wonderful young lady.

The second paragraph was supposed to be some kind of rebuttal to the first paragraph. Of course it didn't make any sense, wasn't related to the topic in any way, except that Liz was a woman and ESR was attacking women's groups, but logic isn't needed for these sorts of things.

Stop hazing us dice. We're just nerds. We're not bad people. We and our industries aren't hostile to women, or minorities, or transgenders, or disabled people.

Stop hazing us. We're not like those sour hipsters who work for/with your offices. We're just nerds. Stop injecting sex and politics and religion into our jobs and pastimes and pursuits. Many of us chose these fields in part to get away from that. Stop labeling programmers as "men", "women", "[RACE HERE]", etc, etc and telling us how we opressed everybody simply by existing. We have usernames and handles to escape our meatspace identities.

This has to stop. These stories have to stop. The politics and the propaganda has to stop.Tech doesn't have a problem. The media has a problem with tech. This hazing has to stop.

I couldn't agree more. I'm a software developer by trade. That I am a woman is a completely irrelevant quantifier in this context, as neither one's biological sex nor one's chosen gender role seems to have any effect on the quality of one's code in my experience.

Frankly, if someone refers to me as a 'female software developer' I'm more likely to feel offended, as if I'm somehow different from my (mostly male) colleagues, despite doing the exact same job and delivering (roughly) the same results.

No, it doesn't indicate a problem. If you think it does, name it, but make sure that it also explains why most car salesmen being male is a problem, and most realtors being female. Be sure that the suggested cure is also applied to remove the gender imbalance in teaching and nursing (mostly female), and in auto repair and roofing (mostly male).

"Yes. 50% of America's population is effectively cut off from going into a field where they might do well."

You are so far off point it is almost pitiful. The problem is not that there are not enough people (Man or Woman), but rather that there are too many already mucking and fscking everything up.

Fredrick Brooks said that "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later". I will offer my own corollary rule: Adding any unqualified developers, anywhere in the process, only increases the end pro

Not entirely social reasons. Most women just don't want to do it. Why force them in order to satisfy some arbitrary quota? An efficient society is one where you let people do the jobs they want to do.

Well you're right. You see groups or people trying to push diversity quotas in on things like programming and IT quite often. But they become very silent, or go "LALALALALALAICANTHEARYOU" when you ask them why they're not pushing for diversity quotas in things like: garbage/recycling collectors, mechanics and autobody workers, miners, fisherman, trappers(that includes wild animals, and crab or lobster), antenna service techs, firefighters and police and so on.

US trash collectors are actually 90% male [bls.gov]. You don't hear a lot of complaining about that gender imbalance. By the same link, US high tech workers and managers are both roughly a quarter female which is much better than you claim.

Well done, you finally admitted that there is a problem. That's the first step.

Congratulations, you just shit on the board, knocked over the pieces, and declared victory. Denial is the first stage of grief. Guess what? The problem with IT isn't too few females, it's too many men. Get the men who don't actually love IT out of the field and these problems will largely solve themselves as hiring pressure from IT departments brings in women who do. Women are smart enough not to enter a field that won't reward them. This is the part where you speculate wildly as to why.

Women being forced and duped into thinking that they have to work in order to be a person is entirely socially generated hysteria and stigma. 40 years ago women did not have "careers" in a workplace because there was little in the way of formula. Meaning if the woman did not stay home and feed the kid, they died of starvation. Since the woman is the only parent with the ability to make milk it made sense for her to make her career in the home. It used to be normal for a woman to help the family save mon

There was a study or two a couple years ago that indicated this was one of the major reasons for the perceived growth in inequality. Before you'd have doctors marrying across classes because it was socially acceptable, but now you ave doctors marrying other doctors, software architects marrying software architects and ditch diggers marrying other people from the same side of the tracks.

I know the material, but your explanation is off the mark (perhaps because you are attempting to be politically correct?). The study was related to how men and women choose partners. Men did not focus on the woman's profession, class, or stature to marry. Doctors married waitresses, teachers, bartenders, or other doctors, and of course women without jobs.

Women do not function the same, and tend to date and marry only the same or better social class. A woman doctor will not normally date a male who is no

"Women do notion the same, and tend to date and marry only the same or better social class. A woman doctor will not normally date a male who is not a doctor, and a woman software engineer will not normally date a welder"

Imagine it's 60 years ago and you have a highly talented daughter that's dating a great guy. They get engaged but he gets killed in some accident. Now she's in her twenties and most of the decent guys she knows are already engaged or married.

She finds another successful man but he's kind of an asshole. She marries him anyway because for women of that era, marriage is really the only legit option in life and she has no other prospects. They have a couple of kids and before long he's developed into a compl

Better for society != better for "me". The majority of divorces in the 60s - 80s were not because all these men became abusive. It was because people were brainwashed into thinking their own happiness was more important than anything else. Further, the only way to get happiness in this brainwashing is through buying lots of stuff.

Instead of seeing what you have been brainwashed to believe, actually do some work and use your noggin.

Were people 40 years ago worried that the US was collapsing? That is abo

"40 years ago women did not have "careers" in a workplace because there was little in the way of formula.... Since the woman is the only parent with the ability to make milk it made sense for her to make her career in the home."

Just exactly how long do you expect this woman to lactate, and how much milk do you expect her to produce?

Seriously, are you mentally disabled? Do you believe that society was always declining like it is today? Are you attempting to fail to understand basic math in addition to basic and very recent history? How long will society last if families are 1 child and 2 adults exactly? Do the math and calculate how fast it collapses when you have double the population in retirement as you do in more productive areas of society.

Just exactly why do you ask asinine questions that do not modify the facts and opinion b

Your twisted belief that you can tell if society is "declining" is actually quite amusing.

"Just exactly why do you ask asinine questions that do not modify the facts and opinion being expressed? Those are all rhetorical questions for you to chew on, not to answer here because you lack the intellect and/or honesty to do so."

But what if most women do NOT want to be in auto repair, roofing, or any other given profession? Same for men, maybe they do NOT want to be elementary school teachers or nurses? So what. I'd like to think that my likes and dislikes can be taken into consideration when training for a job. Yes, by all means give students the opportunity (thirty plus years ago I was the only girl in my "Power and Transportation" class) but beyond that, let the individual not the collective decide. Activists thinking that shovi

I'd like to think that my likes and dislikes can be taken into consideration when training for a job.

I haven't seen anyone suggest shoving people into fields they have no interest in and would absolutely argue against it. The problem is when someone does have interest and capability in a field but is turned off by the people in it.

An imbalance in gender/race/etc. merely indicates the possibility of a problem and may warrant further investigation, but it doesn't guarantee it. Likewise, lack of a problem in o

"I haven't seen anyone suggest shoving people into fields they have no interest in and would absolutely argue against it. The problem is when someone does have interest and capability in a field but is turned off by the people in it.

I totally get how you want to convince yourself and everyone else that this is true. Can you name any field where people can enter (male or Female) without having to deal with people who would tend to "turn them off"?

I'm actually convinced you weren't trying misinform, even though you are an AC. I guess I'm getting to be a "push over" in my old age:-) Politics had absolutely nothing to do with the creation of Linux. The fact that a Unix license was expensive, and Linus Torvalds wanted a Unix-like system for the 80386 processor so decided to write one himself, was the sole reason.

Now perhaps you mean that politics is the entire reason the Linux based OS soft

This conversation was generated by a post Eric S. Raymond published on his "Armed and Dangerous" blog that said, "...if you are any kind of open-source leader or senior figure who is male, do not be alone with any female, ever, at a technical conference. Try to avoid even being alone, ever, because there is a chance that a 'women in tech' advocacy group is going to try to collect your scalp."

Yeah, I think it's a fair fear.

Women are a subset of people, and a subset of people are malicious. There's a sexist

It's not a fair fear because the idea that the numbers of these alleged malicious women are so high that it would require the extraordinary need to never be alone with any woman is ridiculous. And no, refusing to be alone with women at a technical conference is not a win-win for everybody, particularly where that means women are excluded from many of the activities you go to a technical conference for. It is just not a reasonable fear if you are not actually harassing women.

Whether it's a good idea to avoid them is based on the danger. It isn't just the number of malicious women that affects the danger. The danger is *also* affected by how easy it is for them to set up a compromising situation. The current sociopolitical climate is not very friendly to presumption of innocence or believing a man's word and has a very broad definition of harassment--which makes setting up a compromising situation easy, and increases the danger.

(Also, while because a random woman is no more likely to be malicious than anyone else, a woman who wants to be alone with you is not random.)

See: Rebecca Watson, Emma Sulkowicz, Connie St. Louis... the list goes gone. It's a perfectly fair fear, the consequences to women who aren't part of that malicious cult aren't fair, but as feminists are so fond of telling us everyone is "schrodinger's person".

And a good practice. Male doctors, in modern times, are never with a female patient without a female assistant of some kind. Male police officers and security guards avoid detaining or frisking female suspects if a female officer is available and can do so. Male teachers avoid being in "closed office" situations with female students. On a different subject: most (married) people avoid work lunches or dinners with the opposite sex all by themselves (1:1), even if highly visible it creates the appearance of impropriety that might be difficult to explain.

You can't bypass gender by ignoring it, even if your intentions are honest and your actions clean. There are dishonest people out there, and there are more than enough gossips. In male dominated professions we may be accustomed to working exclusively with other men and not have these concerns so frequently in our lives, but, they exist and we should learn to play it smart. In reality these situations can and probably will arise more frequently in M:M and F:F situations as more homosexual people choose to "come out" (i.e. announce a weakness for predators to leap upon). In the words of Lester Burnham: "Can you prove that you didn't offer to save my job if I let you blow me?"

I think part of the issue is that a lot of conventions and social professional forums have a bit more of a party atmosphere than a professional one, and the guards we remember to use at work sometimes get forgotten.

Jesus Christ. The paranoia in this place is astonishing. If it isn't rabid bands of women out to emasculate mail developers, it's evil bands of ACA bureaucrats trying to steal precious bodily fluids or evil climatologists trying to steal everyone's cars.

For fuck's sake, I've worked around women, in offices that were predominantly women, under women managers and now have a female business partner, and I have never once had an issue. I have behaved myself, they have behaved themselves, and we all just get alo

Who wold have thought. Women in IT want to be treated like people. Not with some special care or preferential treatment, want to be judged on their professional merits rather than having privileges for being the "oppressed sex". They don't want to feel offended, and they don't want to be defended, but it seems they want to, ya know, do their effin' WORK.

Dear SJWs. It's really awesome what you want to do, but maybe, just maybe, try to find out first whether what you fight for actually WANTS you to fight for them? You remind me a lot of those "foreign aid" workers who "helped" those "poor, poor Africans" by sending food there until the local farmers had to shut down production because they couldn't compete with your free food anymore. they were not poor. You made them poor. And I fear the same development here.

There are good and hard working women in IT. No, they are not numerous, but they exist. And they are far from being marginalized. They are part of great teams and they are good at what they're doing. I had the fortune that I managed to work with some of them. They are not here because of their looks, they can easily pull their weight as anyone else. And you will notice that they are usually at the very least a little bit embarrassed by all the shit going down about this "women in IT" thing. Because it does harm their reputation.

A friend of mine recently complained about the problem. She has been in IT for about 15 years now, we worked together before and she is a very good programmer. With more and more women being signed up on no other merit than being a women, stereotypes are starting to grow. Because these women cannot code well. They would not have gotten that job were they men, simply because their skills are lacking. The main reason they were hired is (in HER words, please note that!) to be the "quota bitch".

And that casts a shadow on HER reputation. Because stereotypes are a powerful thing. Just ponder the following scenario and tell me honestly and truthfully what you would think:

The former situation was that the women:men ratio was maybe 1:10, maybe even only 1:20 in IT. Of course, all of these 20, 19 men one woman, would know their trade. That's because they were hired. Now, that "affirmative action" bull takes place and women are hired based more on the fact that they're women than their actual skill levels. You'll probably end up with a 1:1 ratio, even, but that would probably also mean that you really have to scrape the bottom of the barrel because there simply are not as many women as there are men in IT.

So that means you have one "good" women and about 10 mediocre to bad programmers of the female gender.

Question for 100 points: What would you think of "the female coworkers"?

And do you really think that this would aid those women in IT that are really good in their job?

The first type is the one in your 1:20 ratio. She's competent and can tolerate the environment of a male dominated workplace. She's not the issue.

The second (theoretical) type is also skilled (or at least has the right inclinations and intelligence type), but she's uncomfortable with the male dominated workplace and so she either leaves the field early or never even gets into the field to begin with.

Some believe that the remedy for the second type of woman is seen to be a place where there are more women, period. This allows them to have friends and the ability to have a more balanced environment. The increase in women in general will make it more attractive to the skilled women as well.

Obviously, this is an assumption, but not a necessarily a terrible one. Many people only feel comfortable among people like them. Same goes for gender, skin color or ethnicity.

A lot of this comes down to what the actual value of a more equitable ratio actually is. What are the quantifiable benefits of this sort of parity or diversity? And are those benefits come at the expense of productivity or opportunity for those who are not selected purely on the basis of their gender? Does one benefit outweigh the other? If so, then the feelings and misconceptions of the other side should give way, at least to the extent that the greatest benefit can be achieved.

I think there is a lot of shooting from the hip on this. I'd like someone to tell me:

1) Does having more females in IT being a perceptible benefit to either IT, or themselves?2) What methods are necessary to achieve those benefits?3) In the end, do any benefits actually outweigh the costs?

Oh. OH. Ok, I'm only comfortable if there are fat people around me so I don't feel insecure about my weight. Can I now force my employer to hire a few? We needn't go to 50%, I'm not that insecure, but how about just replacing the guys in my group with fatsos? They needn't be able to do jack shit for all I care, as long as they make me feel good.

1) Does having more females in IT being a perceptible benefit to either IT, or themselves?

Yes. Women represent a large pool of talent

There are already vastly more applicants than jobs, so it's not clear that increasing the size of the talent pool will help. HR departments regularly receive thousands of resumes for a single job position, and getting more resumes won't help them pick a more qualified candidate. They're already having a hard time sorting through the chaff.

The other thing we really need to do is push back against the anti-feminist nonsense that people like ESR spout.

ESR is a nut and I had to stop following him on G+ because of his nuttery, but a stopped clock etc. We've all known the oversensitive female employee that sucks the life o

There's a lot of good stuff here. I tried to say the same thing on another forum and got shot down for not agreeing that we must push for more women in tech and for companies to have quotes for hiring women, which would be so so bad for the reasons outlined here. Anyway...
I work in a large IT department, we probably have about 50/50 men/women overall, though the numbers vary per job. The hardware/networking/infrastructure is mostly male, the business side, project management office etc is mostly female.

The very best thing you could have done with that particular posting of Eric's would have been to ignore it, and run the story about that nice woman without mentioning it. She can stand on her own and nobody but Eric should be held to account for what he said.

The very best thing you could have done with that particular posting of Eric's would have been to ignore it, and run the story about that nice woman without mentioning it. She can stand on her own and nobody but Eric should be held to account for what he said.

This x 1000.

I wish I'd read it before I posted on this article, though - I've actually got mod points today.

The problem is that for so many women, they have to write BETTER code than their male peers to be considered on the same level. They are put upon to bust stereo-types. And that may be harder for some women to do in work environs which, many times, cater explicitly to male employees.

Yes, this is an indirect response to the video, but the summary and the slant of the question suggest that the interview is as much about grinding a particular axe as interviewing Liz Bennett.

"keep calling bullshit on" is not the same as "repeatedly posting links to one source".

Also, the world is large, and there are a lot of experiences. Not everyone's is the same. Just because one person happens to have a very good experience, doesn't mean it's representative of the whole. Anyway, I don't know that author, so I go on experiences of what I've observed and what people I know have experienced and observed. And those tell me that the author had a rare experience.

And the tone and tenor of the responses is exactly what I would expect. *I* don't see a problem and someone found a woman to personally refute the claim, therefore there must not be a problem. This topic has been written on often enough and in enough detail from enough different angles that, while some of the intricacies are still elusive, we (as a society) are not clueless about this. Those who claim most loudly that there isn't a problem truly mean that there isn't a problem FOR THEM.

No they do not. This is complete bullshit. Code is code. It's either, good, or it isn't. If you stop running around like a chicken with your head cut off long enough to actually listen to women in tech, the vast majority do not actually encounter these imaginary issues you think are so rampant.

This was a serious non-conversation. She never encountered sexism on the work-floor nor has the need to profile herself by causing a shitstorm against a big name in the development world. Actually, she states she'd rather stay distant from those polemics in like the first 2 minutes and her co-workers are cool and supportive. Why keep on hammering on that subject?
Loggly seems like an interesting SaaS platform, with probably cool technology behind it. Cloud based, big data, data mining, load balancing, noSQL

Rob. What an asshole. He's trying to hard to put her in a situation where she'll say something that supports the narrative he's hoping for. He should be fired. This wasn't so much an interview as it was an attempted ambush.

I've met software engineers - as in they went through EE degrees and have the ring to prove it - so do tell, what "accountability" do they have over and above any regular software developer? Because I sure as heck have never seen it. I've never seen them sign off on a gold master with their engineer stamp or suffer any sort of additional accountability in the event of a massive software screwup they were responsible for.

No. It's because the coding profession has no minimum competency and licensing requirements. Shitty code is; a subjective opinion and also not grounds for disciplinary action on the part of an independent licensing or certification body.

Software engineering is a field in computer science with a focus on applying engineering principles to software development. It is well known that software does not yet have a methodical tool set similar to that of classic engineering disciplines, but it is called software engineering, so you will just have to get over it. Mind you, "proper" engineering didn't start out all rigorous and responsible either. Also, way off topic.

That term is reserved for those who have accountability for what they create and in most of the civilized world have gone through a certification process.

What she is, is a software developer. Part of that process is design and testing, but that alone does not make her an engineer.

Fuck all these people who think otherwise and dilute the word because they want to have a way to place themselves from their peers, because they can't do it with their work.

Maybe she is a Software Engineer. There is such a job title, and you don't even have to go to Engineering school to get it. Your company gives it to you. Get over it. Engineer is not a term reserved only for certified people. Professional Engineer is. Use that instead if you want to feel good about yourself and feel the need to lord it over others who may have many more certifications from many other governing bodies that just don't happen to be the one you worship before.

Oh, bullshit. They're engineers just like someone with a PhD in English Lit is a Doctor. "Engineer" is not a designation exclusive to Professional Engineers. Heck, IBM has had the title "Sales Engineer" practically forever, probably since before you were born, anyway.

Where I live, here in the US, you're an engineer if you say so. Unless you work for or on behalf of the government, in which case you are a Professional Engineer (PE). You can be called Doctor if you haven't the slightest background in medicine (all of my university professors insisted on it), but you can't advertise yourself as a Medical Doctor (MD). You can be an Investigator but cannot represent yourself as a policeman or federal agent, unless you actually are. The list goes on. It turns out these words

Not to mention the P.E. setup is something that is peculiar to the US. In Australia, NZ, & the UK for example you work towards achieving Chartered status, which you can only do after you have been working in your field for a number of years (5 years is considered damn fast). On top of that various states have additional requirements such as RPEQ in Queensland which is required to sign off on final drawings.

What does become challenging when comparing titles is when you look at a Civil Engineer from the

So in your mind the only people qualified to be Engineers are mechanical and structural engineers. Those railroad guys, well we have all been hood winked and they were never given that title. Social Engineers, those don't exist either.

It depends on the type of work. Engineering decisions led to the collapse of that bridge in Seattle (though a systematic series of errors) and caused a bridge to rip itself apart when it turned into a giant sail.

Also, there are computer scientists designing the software in pace markers and car fuel injection systems. Some may hold Computer Engineering degrees, but some also hold Computer Science degrees. In either case, they are held to a higher standard of test driven development. Computer Scientists build

The famous bridge collapse from up this way was the Tacoma Narrows Bridge - nothing to do with Seattle at all.

Which every "engineer" learns about in freshman year of undergrad (if they didn't know it before). Most of those young student "engineers" will never seek, desire or find any value in the "Professional Engineer" certification required for working with the government, which is the only forum you might get in legal trouble for advertising yourself as an engineer without being certified. Yet, the few

I can definitely go to jail for releasing buggy code. Human lives depend on it working correctly (or failing gracefully), and if someone dies because of an error I made, I'm definitely facing a sentence. Also, knowing how to code is a lesser part of my occupation. Understanding the problem the code is to solve, along with all the ways it can go wrong, coming up with the project and finally implementing it in software is what I do.

The difference between a software engineer and a developer is the same as betw

1) That branch of science and technology concerned with the design, building, and use of engines, machines, and structures.

2) The action of working artfully to bring something about.

3) Work done by an engineer.

Those of us who do software work create structure; we (if we do hardware as well, create and) use and empower machines; we work artfully to bring the desired outcome about; we are therefore, in every sense of the word, doing engineering, and we are engineers. Many are artists as well, in the domain of the very same pursuits.

As far as a license goes, that's in no way a guarantee of competence (any more than a college degree is), nor is the presumptive ability to sue a worthy indirect guarantee. All you have to look at to understand that is take a look at the incredibly incompetent RF systems put in place at a very large number of radio stations by the system designers, and further, at the incredibly incompetent rules and regulations the engineers at the FCC have put in place both to specify the requirements, and to validate the results of said designs. Oh, and WRT RFI as well. (The idiots at the FCC decided that high speed networking over power lines (BPL) was a reasonable idea. In the realm of undertakings that clearly show government licensed engineers up as complete buffoons, that is surely in the running for number one.)

It is perfectly valid to say that professional software types aren't "licensed engineers." But that in no way is the same thing as saying that software engineers aren't engineers at all. Or that they aren't professionals. They are quite often both. And within that context, there are good ones, bad ones, terrific ones, utterly incompetent ones - but still engineers, doing engineering.

So, My father who has a degree in mechanical engineering, worked for TRW on steering systems, and had the title Senior Engineer was not an engineer, because he did not have a license? He was not required to have a license by his employer or the state. Before he worked on steering systems, he worked on presses for aluminum extrusion (read as involving extremely high pressures).

Both of these positions required him to design systems that if they failed would be vary dangerous and likely seriously injure or kill people. Yet you claim he was not an engineer.

I wonder if you would consider Gustave Eiffel, Henry Ford, Leonardo da Vinci, or James Watt engineers.

Some engineers are licensed in some jurisdictions because it is required by the law or by the employer. However, a license does not make the engineer.

Where do you work such that management is put to a higher standard and face harsher penalties when they fail to live up to it? I would like to submit a resume, since I've never seen such a magical place.

I can 100% correlate this type of staff appraisal with the successful companies I have worked at.